Art Schools and Place: Geographies of Emerging Artists and Art Scenes

Product Description


Art education has a definite impact on artists' sense of place and their spatial relations. Exploring where and why artists choose to locate is the first step in describing an art scene ethnographically. This research considers coming to and going through art school as a crucial inter-subjective learning environment. Artists learn not just to engage with place through spatial and relational practices, but gain a sense of mobility and transnational flows in a globalized art world.This book is the first time the art school has been studied this way in the nascent field of art geography, blending the tool kits of human geography and urban studies. This is timely against the backdrop of worldwide university closures of physical space and cost intensive fine art courses as a triumph of managerialism and business-case over education. This volume helps highlight how investment in this form of education has an important capacity for nurturing art scenes and feeding into the community at large.


Review


Jacobi’s research helps us to better conceptualise the relationship between artists, art schools and place, adding significantly to current knowledge on creative labour, human and cultural geography, arts education and artistic practice.
Art Schools and Place
provides a passionate, richly engaging, original contribution to our understanding of how art schools shape (and are shaped by) place and contextualised learning practices. -- Roberta Comunian, Reader in Creative Economy, Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries, King’s College London


Art Schools and Place
provides an intriguing, case study-based contribution to critical geographies of art. It focuses on delicate interrelations between locally specific, place-based criteria which shape fine arts education and variegated influences of globalized contemporary art worlds. Through thorough empirical analysis, Jacobi shows how the emergence of art scenes is embedded in global art frames, yet permeated by local spatial, cultural and socio-political practices. An appealing read for art school graduates, scholars and arts administrators! -- Friederike Landau, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University


This is a compelling text. In unpicking the geographical and contextual factors in the development of art schools Jacobi opens up an interesting discussion about the purpose of an art education and the role that such institutions play in the wider community. The importance of location, and of space, is fundamental and pertinent at a time when making practices are under scrutiny. -- Henry Ward, Creative Director, Freelands Foundation


Silvie Jacobi highlights an essential characteristic of the Art School that reaches back to their origins from an era of industrialisation and rapid urbanisation. The contemporary importance of this work is in evidencing art school sensitivities to place, mostly disguised as ‘hidden curricular’, genuinely experienced as distributed processes of globally orientated local innovation at a level of individual agency.


-- Paul Haywood, Dean of Academic Programmes: Art and Performance, UAL: Central Saint Martins


This is a fascinating book that examines the role of place in shaping the development of artists, artistic production and art scenes. It should be recommended reading for fine art course leaders both within and outside of our major city centres.

-- Sarah Rowles, Director Q-Art & BA Fine Art Lecturer, Arts University Bournemouth


About the Author


Silvie Jacobi is a Joint-PhD Researcher at King's College Solond and Humbolt University Berlin